April Showers Bring May Flowers

Remember how I said I was going to cover every spare bit of wall space in my apartment with some sort of art? Well, progress has been made.

I've been staring at these flowers on the Urban Outfitters site forever. There's something I like about them but then every time I look at them I decide they're actually sort of dumb and not worth the $40 they cost. Then I'm drawn back and go through the whole thing again. Until all of a sudden it occurred to me that I could paint them.


I went to the craft store and bought a bunch of acrylic craft paint, the kind that's sold near all the unfinished wooden things you can paint, and some cheap brushes. I didn't really have a plan but I started by painting the backsides of the flowers. I left those to dry and came back the next day to do the fronts. I can be impatient so I was pretty stoked that this paint on this material dried really quickly.

Next I had to put them on the wall. The kit comes with these tacks and you basically just hammer them into a wall then snap the back of the flowers on. Not using a hammer is not an option, they aren't like thumbtacks, and you'll likely bend some of them. The kit comes with one extra pin but that wasn't enough to make up for the four tacks I ruined so I ended up super gluing a few to the wall. For those familiar with my past home projects this won't be a surprise. I also have a chandelier super glued to my ceiling and small rugs super glued together to create a large one.

Trust me, it's not as ridiculous as it sounds. And no, the chandelier is not going to fall down.


At this point I had super glued flowers to the walls, had a more than a few plaster mishaps being hidden by flower petals, and figured I was already in for a repair and paint job when I leave my apartment so, why not just go for broke and paint leaves on the wall too?




I can't tell you how happy it makes me to round the corner in the morning and see this. Especially with the recent sun.

I made some more art. Sort of.

I bought these really fantastic frames at Z Gallerie a few weeks ago. I wasn't really sure what to do with them or where to put them but I fell in love and they were 25% off so I pretty much had to buy them.



See?

So now I needed to decide what to put in them. I have a whole wall of photos in my living room so I wanted to do something different. I decided these were going to go in my hall and I wanted to put wallpaper in them. Except I didn't really want to buy rolls of wallpaper and I also didn't really feel like finding a wallpaper store and flipping through books and pretending I was going to buy something so they would give me samples and then get the wrong sizes and...the whole thing seemed like too much work. Know who has beautiful wallpaper though? Anthropologie. And their samples come in exactly the size I needed, 4"x6".

On their site you can request up to 13 samples of wallpapers so I decided to go big or go home and request the maximum 13. When I got them I was quite impressed.




The samples came in this really adorable envelope that someone had written on in very loopy letters with hearts and it was really just too cute. I wanted to photograph it but I also don't want to post my address and have all of you coming over for snacks and to look at my walls and all the things I super glue together.

Anyways, the samples came with this very handy and informative little card full of info. If I actually intended to buy wallpaper this may have sealed the deal. Also each sample had all this important stuff that I'm sure would be very helpful if you knew about wallpaper and were trying to map out how to hang it.

These are the samples I got.



I only had eight frames so I knew I needed to cut out five of the options. I decided I would use these ones somewhere else.



Then I mixed and matched to my heart's content.



And then two weeks later I got around to hanging them.

Deck the Walls

I know some people think wallpaper is sort of old fashioned or outdated but I love it. The problem is when you're renting you can't just go wallpapering other people's walls. To solve this I have decided to wallpaper a large canvas and have it framed, since I don't have any qualms about putting a small hole in other people's walls.

Did you know there are about 50 billion wallpaper designs out there? And 90% of them are ugly. These are a few of the not ugly ones I am considering. It's no secret I love sparkle so most of these have some kind of metallic element to them.










I'm so excited!